Drive showing “Open with” instead of opening

Last night, I cleaned up a virus infection in one of my friends’ portable hard drive. After cleansing the drive of all malware, I found that I couldn’t open the drive by double-clicking on it, or even by right-clicking on it and selecting “Open” or “Explore”.

Here’s what to do if such a thing happens :
(We will assume that the drive which is malfunctioning is denoted by L:)

We need to delete the autorun.inf file(if any) in the root of the drive and replace it with an empty one.

To do this start command prompt by going to Start-> Run-> cmd.
Type in the lines of code one by one.

L:
attrib -S -H -R autorun.inf
del /F autorun.inf

We have now successfully deleted autorun.inf from the root of the drive.We now need to create an empty autorun.inf in the root.

copy con autorun.inf
Press “Ctrl+Z” and then “Enter” key.

Now try to open the drive. If this method doesn’t work, don’t worry, we have more where that came from.

We will now re-register the .DLL files in hopes of fixing this issue. Go to Start >Run. Type in regsvr32 /i shell32.dll. You should get a dialog box as shown below.

Now try to open the drive. If it opens, you are in luck. If it doesn’t, don’t fret. We have some more tricks up our sleeve.

Start the registry editor by going to Start >Run >regedit. When the registry editor opens, press Ctrl+F, and search for MountPoints2. Delete all MountPoints2 keys you find. After you are done, close the registry editor. Now your drives should open normally.

If you have any queries, or you know of another way to fix this issue, feel free to leave a comment.